The phrase “Da stargo tora” is uttered throughout Mute but what is its meaning? Helmed by David Bowie’s director son Duncan Jones, Mute is a Netflix production that was released via the streaming giant in February 2018. A spiritual sequel to Jones’ 2009 feature debut Moon, the neo-noir sci-fi is set in a not-too-distant future and stars Alexander Skarsgård as a Leo, a technophobic Amish man left voiceless after a childhood accident. Leo works as a bartender in a sleazy Berlin strip club named Foreign Dreams where robot strippers are the norm.
It’s at Foreign Dreams Leo meets and falls in love with cocktail waitress Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh). Just as Naadirah is about to reveal something important to Leo, she mysteriously disappears and it soon transpires she was leading a secret life that Leo knew nothing about. Mute sees Leo set out to find his missing love which leads him on a journey into future Berlin’s seedy criminal underworld, where he comes into contact with AWOL army medic Cactus Bill (Paul Rudd) and discovers Naadirah had a daughter she was desperate to escape with.
With its neon-drenched rainy streets and futuristic flying cars, Mute is firmly in the neo-noir sci-fi camp. At the heart of Mute, however, is the love story between Leo and Naadirah – indeed, there is a reason director Duncan Jones calls Mute a “sci-fi Casablanca.” Whereas Casablanca’s star-crossed lovers Rick and Ilsa had “Here’s looking at you kid,” Leo and Naadirah have “Da stargo tora” – words that Naadirah utters to Leo before she disappears and is repeated throughout the film.
It’s a term of endearment in the Pashto language that, as Naadirah explains in Mute, translates literally to “the black of my eyes” in English. In a more metaphorical sense, Naadirah says it means “the thing that makes me feel beautiful” but a bit of research reveals it can also refer to somebody so essential that without them you feel incomplete – kind of like a Pashto version of “the apple of my eye.”
Primarily, “Da stargo tora” symbolizes Naadirah’s love for Leo but the inclusion of a Pashto phrase in Mute serves a bigger purpose too. The futuristic Berlin imagined by Duncan Jones in Mute is a multicultural metropolis. It’s a multilingual meeting point between East and West, hence we hear English, German and Pashto being spoken in Mute. Beyond just a term of endearment, “Da stargo tora” helps build Jones’ futuristic fusion of cultures much in the same way Ridley Scott used Cityspeak in his definitive neo-noir sci-fi Blade Runner.
Next: Mute’s Ending Explained
